Industry veteran Mark Farmer has urged construction leaders to face the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence (AI) on the sector’s white-collar workforce, warning that the industry is “missing a trick” by focusing too narrowly on trade skills shortages.
Delivering this year’s CIOB Sir James Wates lecture in central London on Wednesday evening (24 September), the author of the landmark 2016 Modernise or Die report argued that while the debate around the lack of tradespeople is well known, professional services must stand against an equally profound challenge.
“It would have been easy to talk about the shortage of bricklayers and carpenters,” said Farmer. “But I felt there’s a blind spot here. We’re missing a trick around what AI means for professional services in our industry.”
A disruption beyond site trades
Farmer set out a picture of accelerating technological disruption where white-collar roles, such as quantity surveyors, architects or project managers, are increasingly exposed to AI-driven change.
He noted that while digital tools have been present in construction for decades, their impact has been gradual and often undermined by adversarial business models. BIM, he said, had failed to live up to its promise largely due to cultural resistance rather than technological limitations.
By contrast, AI represents a step change: “We’re not talking incremental, marginal stuff here: we’re talking about massive changes in how we will do our jobs.”
Farmer added that research suggests professional services are among the sectors with the highest potential for AI-led disruption. Big contractors, such as Balfour Beatty and consultancies like his own, are trialling AI tools for data analytics, scheduling and knowledge management.
“The power of AI is exponential. Every day, things are coming forward that are new, that are more powerful, and have a massive implication around use cases,” he said, adding that, unlike previous digital shifts, AI offers a direct financial incentive. “There is a clearer benefits case to using AI in the right context than perhaps there ever was with BIM.”
While some fear widespread unemployment as a result of AI use, Farmer said early adoption suggests AI is being used to increase efficiency rather than eliminate jobs.
Business models under pressure
The founder of the Cast consultancy suggested that the traditional “people for hire” model used by consultancies may be destabilised as AI takes on the bulk of low-value tasks.
Professionals, he added, may increasingly be required to act as certifiers of technology-led outputs, shifting their value-add from delivery to assurance. “The real question is: what does the 20% of high-value professional input look like when the other 80% can be automated?” he asked.
This, he stressed, creates urgent challenges for training and regulation. “We are going to see a requirement for different skills. It’s going to be less about technical domain knowledge and more about technological literacy, critical thinking and integrated knowledge,” Farmer said.
He called on professional institutions to accelerate reform of CPD and competence standards to prevent large parts of the workforce from being left behind, and for new competencies (particularly AI literacy, critical thinking and integrated knowledge) to replace traditional siloed training.
“Everything that’s great about our industry is a function of human endeavour,” Farmer continued. “But everything that’s bad is down to the same. AI is not going to go away. There’s something there around its latent potential that we need to face into.”
Despite the risks, Farmer struck an optimistic note. Properly implemented, he argued, AI could help resolve the productivity crisis that has dogged construction for decades.
“If we can harness just a fraction of what technology can do, then it will release so much potential to be more efficient and deliver better outcomes,” he concluded. “We should all be concerned and excited in equal measure. The biggest challenge for us is mindset.”
Great insights, Mark. But I gathered from what you said that it’s the larger firms that will lead on AI use as they have the data lakes and the tech people to build applications and train users. Industry concentration is likely. Also, BIM and Information Management may have underachieved so far, but AI will make them easier and speed the creation of structured data.